Linked by lemur2 on Mon 20th Jul 2009 18:29 UTC
In a recent interview, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller talks about the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. "Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback. The linked article also indicates that there are other video sites (apart from Wikimedia and Dailymotion) that are moving to the open standards format for video, noting that "hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format".
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RE[6]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web.
by Wrawrat on Tue 21st Jul 2009 15:56
in reply to "RE[5]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web."
Member since:2005-06-30
This is a consideration only if one is using a dedicated chip to do the decoder maths. A general-purpose video processing chip (such as a GPU) is equally able to decode Theora as any other encoding. Math is math, after all, and a transformation function is just math.
Most math operations can be computed faster by fixing some parameters and creating an optimized circuit for the specific operation. That's what I call an "accelerator".
Sure, you can implement a DCT in your GPU, but the fixed DCT operation from the manufacturer is likely to be faster. These paths are not flexible, but good enough for targeting standards that don't change often.
If Apple were foolish enough to include decoding hardware that was not generally programmable (ie the decoder maths is fixed) ... then more fool Apple.
Intel, AMD, nVidia and thousands of hardware manufacturers around the world are including fixed paths in their hardware...
There is no doubt that portable devices from Apple can decode Theora. However, it would require more power to decode than H.264, as their H.264 decoder can use these accelerators.
RE[7]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web.
by lemur2 on Tue 21st Jul 2009 23:24
in reply to "RE[6]: The FUD continues over video codecs for the web."
Member since:2007-02-17
There is no doubt that portable devices from Apple can decode Theora. However, it would require more power to decode than H.264, as their H.264 decoder can use these accelerators.
That is only because Apple put the cart before the horse, and apparently put fixed h.264 dependencies into their hardware. If they had built general support for maths, there would be no power penalty for decoding one format versus the other.
There are way, way too many stakeholders whose best interest is served by ignoring Apple's self-caused dilemma. Apple's mistake cannot be allowed to hold the public web standard for video codecs to ransom.
Period.
Member since:
2007-02-17
They don't have decoders, but common operation accelerators. Unfortunately, most H.264 operations that are interesting to accelerate (spatial transform, entropy encoding/decoding, motion compensation, deblocking) are different from Theora. That said, Theora is close to MPEG-2 in many aspects. Depending on the hardware chip, some parts of it could be accelerated. "
This is a consideration only if one is using a dedicated chip to do the decoder maths. A general-purpose video processing chip (such as a GPU) is equally able to decode Theora as any other encoding. Math is math, after all, and a transformation function is just math.
If Apple were foolish enough to include decoding hardware that was not generally programmable (ie the decoder maths is fixed) ... then more fool Apple.
Apple's mistakes resulting in Apple's vote against Theora should not carry the day against millions of times as many stakeholders whose vote would go the other way (if they were consulted).